After WeWork’s fall, what next for SoftBank?
“His eyes were very strong. Strong, shining eyes.” So Son Masayoshi explained his decision back in 2000 to invest $20m in a Chinese e-commerce startup founded by Jack Ma. By the time SoftBank, Mr Son’s investment group, finished selling most of its stake in Alibaba earlier this year, it had made $65bn from the gamble. Less successful was the Japanese billionaire’s bet on Adam Neumann, the charismatic founder of WeWork, an office-rental firm that declared bankruptcy on November 6th. SoftBank is estimated to have torched around $14bn backing it.
Mr Son’s career has been a tale of soaring highs and crushing lows that have followed the hype cycles in tech. A strategy of doling out big cheques to buzzy firms has served SoftBank well in the upswings but poorly in the downswings. Now, after a bruising year, the indefatigable Mr Son is jumping on tech’s latest craze for all things artificial intelligence (AI). It promises to be a wild ride.
SoftBank, which began life as a software distributor in Japan, reinvented itself amid the dotcom boom of the 1990s as an investment vehicle, buying stakes in hundreds of startups, including Yahoo, a once-popular search engine. At the height of dotcom mania, Mr Son was briefly the richest man in the world. After the bubble burst, he reoriented SoftBank around mobile internet, launching a telecoms business in Japan in 2005, buying a majority stake in Sprint, an American carrier, in 2013, and acquiring Arm, a British designer of smartphone chips, in 2016.
2023-11-16 09:48:08
Original from www.economist.com